If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
A new and improved updated list. We have received a lot of stuff over the last few days as over 13,000 lbs of mail has flown into our neighboring fob. We have been blessed with many things from many people. Here is the lastest and greatest list of things we could use and want.
1. Snyder Sourdough Hard Pretzels.
2. Tortilla Chips (you would not beleive how hard they are to find here) (We have lots of dip mix, but no chips)
3. Dried Fruit (for pancakes and munching)
4. Rotel
5. Shaving Cream
6. DVDs (action, comedy, drama)
7. Box sets of any TV shows
8. Nice sheets for twin sized beds
9. Good pillows like down or whatever other kind are nice
10. Pillow top mattress covers for Twin beds
11. Large Bath towels
12. Febreeze or something like it. Also there is a product called Armor Fresh for body armor.
13. denture cleaner for our camelback water systems.
14. canned air for computers and weapons
15. lens paper and lens cleaner for optics, scopes, goggles, Ballistic glasses and night vision devices
We currently DO NOT need hand sanitizer, stationary, books, velveeta, pancake mix, spices, recipies, drink mixes. We may need some of these in the future, but as of now we have more than enough.
Sorry I have been absent the last few days. I had to take a little trip to Kabul and Baghram. We go up o’dark thirty yesterday and drove to Camp Phoenix in Kabul. We dropped off our terps and dropped off some IT guys that were working at our FOB. We then drove to Baghram to take care of some business and drop Smoke off so he could finally catch his flight home for leave. After being at Baghram for 5-6 hours we drove back here to Camp Phoenix. We stayed last night here and were supposed to leave this afternoon but decided to stay one more night since we had a lot of more bumming and glomming to do. We order and need a lot of things at our little FOB but never get them. Since we are here at the main HQ of the ETT mission, we are begging for many items we cannot get like radios, gear, tools, etc. etc. It has been a good day and we have accomplished a lot. Our terps love getting an extra day at home also. So I stopped into the education center (yes, they have one of those here) and decided to drop a quick blog entry.
I have also run into a lot of people I know up here. I have got to say Hi to a lot of people I have not seen since leaving MS back in May. I also got a chance to run into CPT K (mmmmkay) from our NY team. Good to see him since his Bday is in two days. In addition I ran into Maj. Strong who is the 41st BCT PAO and has a new blog site up. Probably my favorite person to run into was Scott Kesterson, who I spent close to 2 hours talking with last night. Scott is the embedded reporter that I have developed a friendship with and have not seen since May 16th. Scott has been into a lot of heavy fighting areas and has been bouncing all over the country. Since I have not seen him for a while I was afraid he was booted out of country or something. I know a lot of people that follow my blog also follow his and I told him that. I told him that I have missed his stories as have quite a few people that have emailed me asking why he has not posted. He filled me in on why, and also told me we should be seeing stories from him soon. I am also hoping to see him in my neck of the woods in the next month. He showed me several of his raw and uncut videos (of which some are posted on his blog site) and we chatted about things in my area of operation and some things he has seen. Scott is a great guy and nice as heck. He used to be a NCO and was then an Officer in the Oregon NG, so he knows what it is like to be a soldier. He talks like a soldier, walks like one and acts like one…except his has more freedoms to speak the truth.
JP from milblogging.com always jokes about Chuck Norris on his site, but what is funny is that with his color hair and beard, Scott really kind of looks like Chuck. I should know as my Uncle Jim who used to be a professional Karate competitor has sparred, fought with and trained with Chuck Norris before and has several pics of him and Chuck together back in the day.
So that is what I have been up to and why I have been absent. I checked my inbox today too and I can see I have lots of emails to respond to when I get back to my FOB. Until then, take care, keep reading and if you get a chance register on milblogging.com and check out some of the sites on there. Also, don’t forget you can vote for my blog on there as one of your favorites, if you want to. In the words of JP, Chuck would vote for it if he read it….
What a day today, it started out slow as it is Friday and since that is the ANA’s day off we take that as our day to pull maintenance on vehicles, weapons, optics, radios and ourselves. I normally sleep in a little on Fridays and just relax all day while doing maintenance. This morning I spent most of the time putting up more shelves in my new room and dealing with two contractors. One was the AC repair guy who tore up my AC yesterday and now has to go to Kabul to get a new one. This means several more days without AC. The other is the Satellite TV guy who was here making things right after screwing things up the last few times. Today he brought in all new dishes and all new boxes. We have been fighting with these satellite TV installation for over a month now.
After I got done with the contractors I was working with the shelves some more and still moving small items from my old room. Since my wall-locker does not have a place to hang things I found a piece of rebar and made myself a clothes-rack to hang my uniforms on. During lunch I chatted with some of the new occupants of the FOB. See yesterday we had 11 new Air Force people and 1 new Army guy show up. They are here to help support the FOB and handle the garrison issues. I don’t remember the exact breakdown, but they have and IT guy, a generator mechanic, a vehicle mechanic, logisticians, cooks, and others. Since we spend so much of our time doing life support tasks here, they are here to help relieve us of that burden. This morning Maj D and I introduced ourselves to them and briefed them on life here, what some of the policies are on the FOB and other things they need to know about. At lunch I got to sit and chat with a few to ask where they are from, what their normal AF job is, etc. The cooks we are really happy to see, because this means we don’t have to cook anymore. Of course our team will still do our Sunday brunch, but other than that breakfast and dinner is now cooked for us. Tonight was the first night of dinner being prepared by them. They did ok, but of course it is still too early tell.
As the day went on the busier it got. Around mid-afternoon the convoy that went to the PRT to get food and mail came back. I knew we would have some mail since we had not seen any in quite a while and I knew there was a lot in the system for me. It seems the PRT FOB had over 3 tons of mail delivered today. There must have been some backlogged somewhere. They are still sorting it over there and they told our guys we should be getting mail for several more days as they sort it. I was afraid I would get flooded and I did. I got 16 boxes today alone. I had to get several other guys to help me open it all. I opened the boxes from my wife and brother, but had them help open the ones from people that send via the Booksforsoldiers.com website since that stuff is for all of us. I just got done putting stuff away a little while ago and am still working on thank your emails and cards. I cannot imagine what tomorrow will bring in the way of mail.
We had a meeting this afternoon to talk about the upcoming week’s events and some other issues. As the meeting was getting over the BDE staff showed back up from a meeting they had at corps HQ. They brought back one gift for me, a brand-new M1151 Up-armored HUMVEE. The 1151 is the newest model with the latest armor package, radios, etc. etc. Since my Command truck has been broke down and getting fixes at corps for over 2 months, they sent this one to us so we can have something. So this afternoon I was getting pulled between opening boxes and crawling through my new truck oooohing and aaaaahing at all the new features, bells, and whistles. I still haven’t seen them all, but will tomorrow as I sign for it and start getting it ready. So today I got my satellite fixed, a new HUMVEE, 16 boxes of mail of which two were from my wonderful wife and included my anniversary presents for our special day coming up, and had dinner cooked for us. AC is still broke but we will manage with the one that is still in the room. Tomorrow AM I have to get up early as we have to take Smoke to the PRT FOB to catch a flight out for him to go home on his mid-tour leave. The day started out slow, but ended going 1000 mph. I was bouncing from one thing to another, with me finally getting my equipment maintenance done this evening after dinner.
In addition to auditing the recon company, my two roommates (Puss and Prophet) and myself moved rooms. As part of our winterization plan, we had one room insulated and painted. This was our test room to see what we liked and did not like about the insulation project. After it was painted and finished, it was decided that we would move out of our room and free ours up to get done next. So over the last few days we had walls, beds, and shelves built. I also opted for a nice desk rather than shelves. Because our days are packed full of stuff to do, we have been mostly moving at night, which means we are not 100% done yet. Since tomorrow is our down day I think we will get it wrapped up by then. We are still trying to tweak things and give it that homely feeling. I built a corner TV stand for our TV along with about 4 shelves. They are not the prettiest as I had to use what wood was available and there is no way my wife would let me get by with building things like this, but by Afghan standards I look like Bob Villa. I am not done yet, as I want to build shelves for my room tomorrow and hopefully free up enough space so I can get rid of the wall-locker and make more room in my little area. If time allows, that will be a project for tomorrow.
Today was our day to get the Recon company out and re-zeroed and qualified on their AK-47s again. Actually the last week we have been focusing on them a lot. We did a complete showdown of all of their gear, noting every person that is missing every item. We also went through all of their personnel records noting where every person is, what their rank is, who is and who is not getting paid properly and many other items relating to personnel, supply and training. Essentially we are going through each company auditing them and all their people. One of the final actions is to take them back to the range and completely re-zero and re-qualify everyone on their personal AK-47 rifles. What is nice about running a range here vs. the US is that we just go out in the desert, find a spot with a mountain backdrop and that is now our range. No left and right limit, no range control tower procedures, no anything. Just pull up and say this is it…lets shoot.
Anyway, we spent aaalllll day out there and we over 50% done, but will have to finish up on Saturday. See tomorrow is their day off so no training will happen then. Anyway it was a long, hot and boring day. Maj D, CPT T (Face) and myself pulled security for them while the ETTs ran the range. Their way of running a range is a little bit different and more comical than ours. For one thing, we range walk when moving on a range. A range walk is nothing more than a fast walk like you see people do in the mall when they are exercising. The ANA run, at full sprints. They run to the target, check them, mark their holes, and run back. Also, when they mess up like in clearing their weapon after each iteration, the Platoon Leader or 1SG hits them with rocks. They throw them right at the helmets and yell at the soldiers for messing up. This had us cracking up of course.
Over a month ago I had to shut down the comments feature on my webcam because people were leaving very inappropriate messages on there. I have also had to shut down the guestbook feature on my site because of the same reason and because it was getting spammed. Last night someone started a script that began leaving comments on every post in this blog and on my family blog and the comments were spam for some online medicine site.
A lot of people like to leave comments on my blog entries so rather than shut down that feature, I have made it where you must register and be a member of this blog site in order to leave comments. Sorry for the hassle, but I had no choice. You will see on the left side a link that says “Click Here to Registerâ€. That will open a window for you to create an account. You can fill this page out and click the button. It will create you an account and send the password to your valid email account you typed in on the request page.
Again sorry for the bother, but this is necessary to keep the comment feature alive.
It is still hot as hades in the day time, but at night it is cooling down. Actually last night I wished I had my fleece jacket. Not that summer is over yet, but I think this is a lot cooler of an August than what is normal and what is expected. I know all the rain and thunderstorms are more than what they are used to. According to the locals we are not even in the rainy season yet. So maybe that is why it is cooler than normal? What I do know is that we are looking forward and trying to get a winterization plan into effect now for both us and the ANA. We are insulating our rooms right now and have been doing gear inspections to see that the ANA soldiers are missing. The reports we got from last winter were that the Chigo AC/Heater units froze up last year and the fuel in the Wesley Heaters turned to sludge because it got so cold. The average temp in the rooms last year sometimes was 4 below zero, because the heaters shut down. This is not a good thing. It is even worse for the ANA as we have gear and sleeping bags to survive, they don’t. It is hard enough to get them out to do missions, if it gets that cold there is no way they will go out. I always tell people that the cold and bullets will show the true side of a man. It will turn a hero into a zero or a zero into a hero. After living for 9 years in Alaska, including jump-mastering and jumping out of aircraft doing 130 Knots in 50 below zero, I know cold. I also know how hard it is to motivate your men and yourself to get out of that warm bag and get things done.
People can talk all the trash they want, be as bravado as they want, and act like Tommy Tufffnuts until the cows come home, but put the temp below zero or start putting rounds over their head and then you will see their true character. So, I hope our winterization plan gets moving fast and we get the money to do what we want, otherwise life will be miserable here.
